2MB Pros and Cons

[adamstgBit]

2MB Block Limit Increase

Pros	Cons
________________________________________________________	________________________________________________________
Double transaction capacity Improved user experience, ( no more threads about a TX taking a long time to get confirmations ) temporary effect Makes sustained spam attacks much more costly to accomplish. (Basically, doubles the cost of an attack, or limits its duration to 1/2 as long) temporary effect minimal effect, at 1-5cent fee / TX, It still is cheap to spam the free space the 1MB of extra space provides. spam is OK, it simply increases total fees collected by miners More fees potentially collected by miners on each block Business can operate with less fear of being outed from the network because high fees   Renewed trust in the development process and in the network scalability capacity Bitcoin users will stop dumping their coins in favor of alternative coin like ETH. Less reliance on side chains, LN, and centralized payment processors to handle TX. It's likely that most users will end up using centralized payment processors to process their smaller value TX, centralized payment processors could employ fractional reserves, and all kinds of other nasty things bitcoin was meant to solve. More adoption BTC value will rise as a result We maintain the positive correlation between price and volumelink TX volume was never meant to be capped, not allowing the block limit to rise is a change in and of itself Not bumping limit to 2MB could cause a fork. It's no secret poeple want 2MB, we've seen open letters signed by many many top bitcoin businesses stating they want bigger blocks, we've also see the same thing coming from the a huge % of hashrate, it's not unreasonable to assume, inaction on this issue will cause a fork.	Requires hard fork There is a risk of splitting into 2 chains, but properly implementing the hardfork with a 75% threshold and lengthy grace period, makes the risk of a "war" breaking out filled with pain & confusion for users and merchant, unlikely Increased resource usage (capacity, bandwidth, processing power) If the user base shrinks it will put an unnecessary burden on a smaller user base. They can always change it back, But also it is just limit, not actual block size, miners can use any soft limit they want, like they did when we had a 1MB limit but the miners had a soft limit of 256KB The possibility exists to construct a TX that takes too long to validate easily mitigated, through the use of soft limits imposed by miners limiting the number of inputs a TX can have.   Increased chance for orphan blocks. more data required, it is believed the effect will be minimal but we have no hard data either way Sets a bad precedent for changing consensus rules, and can lead down a slippery slope, which eventually lead to: only high-end  datacenter servers could participate in Bitcoin. The change wasn't done lightly it tooks years of debate. 2MB wouldn't be a final solution, this makes a lot of Pros a temporary effect,  and we won't achieve similar scalability to other payment methods like VISA bitcoin doesn't have 800 million users. bitcoin has ~2 million users 2MB will satisfy the current number of users  and allow for some growth 2MB might not be the ultimate scaling solution, but alongside segwit and Lighting Network we can scale bitcoin beyond VISA like capacity. Less adoption, network latency will increase, potentially forcing some full node clients with high latency or low bandwidth connections from participating. (think small African village in bum fuck nowhere for instance) SPV clients mitigate this issue.

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Black Text Is a Pro or Con related to a 2MB block limit.
Green Text Is used to highlight key points which give the Pro or Con more validity  
Red Text Is used to highlight key points which debunk or lessen the validity of the Pro or Con



We are compiling a list of some basic pros and cons for a 2MB HF. please post below some Pros or Cons to a 2MB block limit, and discuss them. Feel free to try and debunk the pros / cons i will try and follow the discussion and summarize / post links to these posts with more information. Free feel to ask me to reword a Pro or Con listed in OP for added clarity, please provide full text as you believe it should appear.

OP will not include any reference to Core or Classic, only the pros and cons of a 2MB block limit increase, pure and simple.

This time next year Core will be looking for wide spread consensus before raising block limit to 2MB,  Its is my hope that this Pro & Con List will help users and miners understand all the specific issues related to block size limit. so they can be confident about their decision to vote for a limit increase or not.

Thank you for your input!

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[Lauda]

First things that come to my mind:
Pros (well, there's only 1): more transaction capacity (user/network growth whatever is the result of this and thus should be labeled as one).
Cons: Requires hard fork; increased resource usage (capacity, bandwidth, processing power); potentially unsafe (the possibility exists to construct a TX that takes too long to validate).
Maybe one could consider experience in dealing with hard forks a pro (the whole ecosystem). I certainly wouldn't mind it much.

[Yakamoto]

Pro: Better scaling for increasing transaction counts in the future.
Con: Most likely a hard fork to an alternative client or some changes in the current client.

Con: Neckbeards saying "I told you so" and measuring their dicks over the internet based on what block size is taken. /s

[adamstgBit]

feel free to try and debunk the pors / cons i will try and follow the discussion and summarize / post links to these posts with more information.

[adamstgBit]

Pro: Improved user experience, ( no more threads about TX taking a long time to get confirmations )

[Lauda]

feel free to try and debunk the pors / cons i will try and follow the discussion and summarize / post links to these posts with more information.

I think that the ones that I've posted can't be debunked as they are kind of "facts" (we are talking about a 2 MB block size limit; no added limitations of any sort). However, I'd like to see what others have to say as long as nobody starts promoting as kind of implementations. Let's see if it is actually possible to just have a discussion about a proposal without mentioning any 'sides' anymore.

Pro: Improved user experience, ( no more threads about TX taking a long time to get confirmations )

I would still label that as the first one. This is because this is a temporary effect maybe add within brackets. It is quite possible for someone to spam at 2 MB block size limit to cause the same delays that we've had lately.

[lucasjkr]

Pro:

Makes sustained spam attacks much more costly to accomplish.

(Basically, doubles the cost of an attack, or limits its duration to 1/2 as long)

[Lauda]

Pro:

Makes sustained spam attacks much more costly to accomplish.

(Basically, doubles the cost of an attack, or limits its duration to 1/2 as long)

We are still talking about very small amounts of money here and I don't see this as being effective at all regardless of what some may think. Even if the costs increased tenfold we are talking about small amounts of money. However, adamstgbit already added:

Pro: Improved user experience, ( no more threads about TX taking a long time to get confirmations )

Which would be practically the same because the user experience was a bit lacking when the attack was going on (due to bad fee calculations).

[DarkHyudrA]

Maybe put on Cons that it will increase the chance for orphan blocks?
1MB to 2MB the increase should be subtle, but it's a increase anyway.

[adamstgBit]

Pro:

Makes sustained spam attacks much more costly to accomplish.

(Basically, doubles the cost of an attack, or limits its duration to 1/2 as long)

We are still talking about very small amounts of money here and I don't see this as being effective at all regardless of what some may think. Even if the costs increased tenfold we are talking about small amounts of money. However, adamstgbit already added:

Pro: Improved user experience, ( no more threads about TX taking a long time to get confirmations )

Which would be practically the same because the user experience was a bit lacking when the attack was going on (due to bad fee calculations).

assuming fees go down after 2MB is implemented, at 1cent pre TX and ~1500TX to fill a the 1MB of free space the 2MB block provides, we are looking at 10$ / 10mins , so i guess i have to agree with you, spamming the network is still cheap like dirt.

[adamstgBit]

Free feel to ask me to reword a Pro or Con listed in OP for added clarity, please provide full text as you believe it should appear.

[Lauda]

4) Increased chance for orphan blocks.
minimal effect, the increase to 2MB is not drastic enough to really impact orphan rate.

I dislike that you add a red text so quickly here. We do not have the data on how exactly this would impact orphan rates (at least I don't; and data not present in this thread). The orphan rates tend to change often (some days there are a lot of them, and some there are almost none). Just because the increase is by 2x that does not mean that the Orphan rates will necessarily rise by 2x (or stay the same). Somebody would have to provide data/do the calculations themselves.

[adamstgBit]

4) Increased chance for orphan blocks.
minimal effect, the increase to 2MB is not drastic enough to really impact orphan rate.

I dislike that you add a red text so quickly here. We do not have the data on how exactly this would impact orphan rates (at least I don't; and data not present in this thread). The orphan rates tend to change often (some days there are a lot of them, and some there are almost none). Just because the increase is by 2x that does not mean that the Orphan rates will necessarily rise by 2x (or stay the same). Somebody would have to provide data/do the calculations themselves.

agreed and edited

[btcusury]

What about the idea that an actual hardfork would instantaneously create ClassicCoins and Bitcoins (or CoreCoins)? A big pro for certain parties, the biggest con on users.

[adamstgBit]

What about the idea that an actual hardfork would instantaneously create ClassicCoins and Bitcoins (or CoreCoins)? A big pro for certain parties, the biggest con on users.

we are not considering Classic vs Core here
only the pros and cons of a 2MB block limit increase, pure and simple.

[Amph]

What about the idea that an actual hardfork would instantaneously create ClassicCoins and Bitcoins (or CoreCoins)? A big pro for certain parties, the biggest con on users.

again this, there is no double chain ever, because consensus it's not at 51%, it is at a much higher %, so there is no possibility to have this

if less miners are ming another chain then they are mining an altcoin sha256

[adamstgBit]

What about the idea that an actual hardfork would instantaneously create ClassicCoins and Bitcoins (or CoreCoins)? A big pro for certain parties, the biggest con on users.

again this, there is no double chain ever, because consensus it's not at 51%, it is at a much higher %, so there is no possibility to have this

if less miners are ming another chain then they are mining an altcoin sha256

again this has nothing to do with this thread persay.

all we are looking for is pros and cons a 2MB block limit increase would theoretically have

[adamstgBit]

Pro: more fees collected by miners on each block

[Lauda]

Pro: more fees collected by miners on each block

I don't think we can be sure of this (as we don't know how the fee is going to change; this moment the recommended is 30 satoshis/byte). What if the fees per TX drop by two and the amount of TX's increases by two? The amount of collected fees would remain the same in this case. What I'm saying is that we don't have enough experience nor are things as simple as people think (e.g. some think that a 2 MB block size limit == 1 line of code changed). Sounds simple, but the change isn't.

[adamstgBit]

Pro: more fees collected by miners on each block

I don't think we can be sure of this (as we don't know how the fee is going to change; this moment the recommended is 30 satoshis/byte). What if the fees per TX drop by two and the amount of TX's increases by two? The amount of collected fees would remain the same in this case. What I'm saying is that we don't have enough experience nor are things as simple as people think (e.g. some think that a 2 MB block size limit == 1 line of code changed). Sounds simple, but the change isn't.

i think it's worth noting all of this in OP.



Pro: lower TX Fees!